Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2008-12-08 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by price. In attendance were Voting members: broder, price, mitchb, nelhage, jesstess, quentin Associate members: wdaher, andersk, tabbott, asedeno, k_lai | jbarnold Prospectives: y_z, afarrell, biyeun, xavid, tvald | fawkes Guests: Officer Reports: price: *checks on quorum, succeeds* We have two membership elections tonight. xavid and y_z, please stand up and introduce yourselves. xavid: I'm Xavid. I was a prospective four or so years ago, but got discouraged, and didn't do much for a while until this past summer. I made the posters that went up in clusters for some reason. I worked on the Debathena LiveCD, which is pretty cool and is now safe to use. I've been doing scheduling and room arrangements for IAP. y_z: I'm Yang, a grad student here at CSAIL. I started as a prospective this summer. Since then, I've worked on invirt-config for XVM. This Fall, I've been coorganizing Cluedumps. jesstess: Why were you discouraged four years ago? xavid: I came here and met jbarnold. We talked with some other prospectives about an AIM-to-zephyr gateway, discussed some plans, and the other prospectives disappeared and didn't really respond to e-mail about it. I was intimidated by not really having a completed project to come back and show off. The LiveCD was more successful the second time around. broder: Turn around, and alternate naming office heads. xavid/y_z alternating: oliver, opus, bobbi-harlow, mega-man, kid-icarus, zsr (sort of), mariel-hemingway price/broder: You missed coleco-sidewinder, portnoy, bart-savagewood, cutter-john, and deathtongue. jbarnold: When SIPB renames heads to the disdain of all our alumni, what theme should it pick? xavid: My first thought is something logical/easy, but that's not fun... y_z: sipb-1, sipb-2, sipb-3... xavid: Hacks, but that's been done for the dialups. nelhage: Handle a canonical membership question and name them after SIPB chairs. price: What do you wish SIPB did better? xavid: As said before, we could do better at introducing new people and making them feel more comfortable. It's a little hard for someone who doesn't know much about programming to get involved. [to price] You've been doing a lot to find things for people to get involved with, but maybe a separate position to work on getting people involved would help. price: So, a SIPB Rush Chair? y_z: I agree, parts of the website are up to date, but maybe a wiki with this sort of info would help. Improving PR for SIPB. People walk by this office and sometimes ask me "What's in here?" It really seems like some people don't know. price: What could we do to make that better? y_z: To increase general awareness of SIPB and what they do for the community, it's useful to provide services that are more far-reaching than scripts. Like support, asksipb, etc. xavid: Work on making the services we provide more accessible to people. Make it possible to do more stuff without having to mess with the command line, etc. jesstess: I feel like in the last couple of membership meetings, there've been more technical funny questions, so I'm going to try something like that. Someone comes into the office and says that they know you're cool because you have green text on a black background, but asks why you would ever not just use webmail? I charge you to explain to them some things that are easier to do from the command line. xavid: It's easier to do things on machines even if you're not sitting at the machine, like getting files off of it. y_z: It's easier to automate things and make scripts. jbarnold: I like to ask this every year or so to remind people... Instead of jhawk this time, it's wdaher who gets an iPod and it breaks, and he tries to repair it with a bunch of high-power sketchy electrical equipment. He begins to get electrocuted. Where's the nearest electrical box, etc.? xavid: There's an electrical box behind the door. jbarnold: Good. What about fire equipment? broder: Even I don't know that. jbarnold: Our whiteboard outside blocks a fire extinguisher and hose. mitchb: Well, that's certainly violating code. However, I'll note that "it is MIT's policy to not fight fires." tabbott: xavid - you've been working on Debathena. What do you think its biggest problem is today? xavid: Getting more people to use it. I think it's mostly used within SIPB at this point. I think it's coming along well, though. tabbott: y_z - same question for XVM. y_z: The biggest thing is getting it out into the world - beyond MIT. price: What do we need to do for that? y_z: The first step is deploying at Harvard, and then refining packages. xavid: Get wireless working for GDM. mitchb: How about first just getting wireless to work? broder: You're here and someone walks in. What's the worst service you can think of them asking you for help with? xavid: If they asked about discuss, I'd know nothing. mitchb: *sigh* y_z: MATLAB. quentin: SIPB has a bunch of services. What do you think are the best and worst services? xavid: The best is scripts. I thought it worked better before I started getting zephyrs about it, though. discuss is worst. y_z: Support is best. I guess discuss is also worst. price: Decades ago, SIPB existed to control access to multics... mitchb: It still does... price: And then we started developing stuff for this single homogeneous environment that runs in all the clusters. Now kids come to campus with laptops and aren't so interested in using clusters anymore. So, now Athena is changing and shrinking. In the future, what is the next big thing SIPB should be working on? y_z: I'm not sure clusters are really going away. Keep working on Debathena. xavid: A lot of the potential room for growth for SIPB is projects and services like scripts/XVM that you can access from anywhere, even when you're on your laptop. price: So we've done the web with one of those. We've done virtualization with another. What else is there? xavid: I see lots of incremental improvements with adding more capabilities to scripts and such. I don't think I'm able to predict what the next big awesome thing will be. jbarnold: I agree that scripts and XVM are not "done." broder: The XVM maintainers agree. wdaher: How do you feel about a proposed SIPB dress-up day where everyone would have to wear suits and such in the office? xavid: Well, I wouldn't object, but it'd increase the chances that I just wouldn't come to that meeting. y_z: Sure. broder: Do you believe that an office espresso machine would FTGOS? xavid: I'd have to conduct some sort of study, not being much of an espresso drinker myself. I guess things like Cokecomm motivate people to be here. jbarnold: Each name 5 SIPB members/prospectives who aren't present. xavid: foley, paigep, cordelia, rax, eichin y_z: golem, neboat, njess, jhawk, kolya tabbott: Favorite SIPB office decoration? xavid: The Kerberos one. y_z: Poster on the front door. broder: I move that asedeno ask the question. asedeno: *asks the question* xavid: I want to work on cool projects, but left to my own devices, nothing gets done. SIPB has lots of resources; for example, nelhage's experience with LiveCDs was very useful to me. There are a lot of people who care what I'm working on, etc. y_z: I learn a lot from SIPB members and being around helps with that. It's inspiring and I want to be able to help others. <10-0-0 xavid is elected> <8-0-2 y_z is elected> price: Congratulations. *jbarnold continues to try shredding the ballots* SIPB Projects Report: broder: XVM is attempting to diagnose ongoing issues with its "awesome" RAID. We're seeing the same problems as we used to before, but didn't notice this until after we transitioned to the production cluster. The problem always happens 40 seconds after a multiple of 5 minutes. We've contacted the open-iscsi list, which has already proven to be more helpful than Dell. price: On Saturday, we're having an awesome hackathon about squashing bugs in the upcoming release of Lenny. broder: The new script /mit/debathena/debian-bts/get_bugs lists open release-critical bugs in Lenny. Run it on linerva. price: We'll post a webpage with info like that during the hackathon. You should come. You don't have to have a lot of experience with Debian or fixing obscure bugs in packages. There will be a wide range of kinds of bugs, and at least three Debian developers will be present. These are people who are well-experienced and have a voice in the project to help us figure out how to get our changes in properly. Their focus will be making sure that everyone who shows up learns what they need to in order to contribute. tabbott: The task of picking up software you've never seen before and learning how to fix something with it is a good experience. price: This is a project that will impact orders of magnitude more people than many things we usually work on. xavid: There's a new version of the Debathena LiveCD out that won't result in your box being rooted by random people on the Internet. It also has an install option that seems to work. xavid: IAP is really soon. We currently have distinctly fewer classes than last year. You should really teach one. afarrell: I'm teaching a class on UNIX productivity. y_z: Tomorrow night, price and broder will be presenting a Cluedump on XVM. price: You can learn about all the cool techniques we've used to implement XVM's features. Office Report: price: Just before the meeting, someone walked in and said "gee, the SIPB office is full. I'll go work somewhere else" and left. And the office did look full... there were about 13 people present. Laptop land is a mess. *begins cleaning the office* broder: I move to allocate $25 to buy "Twisted Network Programming Essentials." price: I second. nelhage: But then we run the risk that someone in SIPB might understand Twisted. broder: Don't worry. I've seen it on Safari. It's only moderately useful. broder: The RCCs got mail from Stuart saying they've upgraded firmware on the new access points, which they believe will solve some of the problems. quentin: Our discussion with the Cisco engineers Friday resulted in them telling us that they still don't know what the problem is. So, it might have spontaneously gotten fixed, but that doesn't mean they understand what was wrong. Other: andersk: never use sprintf with overlapping input and output. It will break. broder: How many bugs have you filed on it? andersk: I'm going to file 230. broder: But how many have you already filed? andersk: About 12. Other Other: '() The meeting was adjourned at 20:18. Minutes taken and submitted by mitchb.